How Does Doonesbury Stay Ahead of the Curve? 3 comments
Jeez, Louise, Jiminy Cricket and Jesus H. Christ on a shingle, I never thought I'd look forward so much to Labor Day falling on the anniversary of the beginning of WW II, 1 September this year, as I do now.
Never mind that the election won't be for another solid 2 months after that.
OK, for starters, speaking as a born Elitist Upper East Sider, and as someone who went through High School being Ja Accused of looking like a young Harold Ross, and who also recently spent his days toiling at work cleaning, and thinking of interior decorating plans for an outdoor latrine called the New Yorker, and who who just so happens to own the complete set of the New Yorker cartoons, all of this hullabaloo is a non-starter.
Why?
Well, the TheNewYorker.com website has an Alexa traffic rank of 5,600, or so, and that's for the entire world of web freeloaders.
Here in the good old USA, The New Yorker has a paid subscriber base of about 1 million copies a month, about 1/3 of 1% of the US population, or to put it another way....
99.67% of the American population does NOT subscribe to The New Yorker.
Never have, never will.
In other words, they don't influence jack diddly squat and it's delusional to think that they do.
Just like nobody listens to Techno, no one reads The New Yorker, not even for the cartoons.
Various other phrases around all this sound and fury spring to mind as well:
Slow News Day, Summer Doldrums, Dog Days Of Summer, Help!!! I've Got A 24 Hour News Cycle To Fill and I Can't Get Up!!!
Etc, etc, you get the picture.
This is not to say that there isn't any merit to these attacks on our Mister Obama being uncalled for and below the belt and just downright unsporting, because they are.
It's been little noticed in this past week but Doonesbury pretty much covered all this ground in the last week of the just passed month of June:
(Click On Each Individual Panel To Enlarge)
Time for a Buff First Lady 0 comments
I read this review in the newspaper - it talked about what Michelle Obama was wearing. I work out with weights 3x/week and I have thought about this alot.
The most notable aspect of her dress was that it was sleeveless. In the preposterously narrowly defined sartorial world of first ladyness, this means something other than it is June and thus, warm.
Generally, the women who have occupied the White House have been loath to appear sleeveless in public, as if the upper arms are some sort of political erogenous zone. They also tend to wardrobe themselves in suits that are tasteful above everything else -- including comfortable, flattering or even vaguely fashionable. So Obama was bucking tradition.
It is also true that a significant number of women, beginning as early as 30-something, don't particularly enjoy revealing their arms because they are self-conscious that theirs do not look like Madonna's sinewy limbs. While Michelle Obama doesn't look as though she spends half her day in a yoga half push-up -- chaturanga dandasana, to be specific -- she looks fit and she's got the arms to prove it.
